illiteratehack writes: Citizens in the Middle East are getting around the ban on Blackberry messaging by installing social networking aggregators on their Blackberrys. It seems that users simply want the functionality of instant messaging rather than a specific software/hardware configuration.

alphadogg writes: All of us get unsolicited commercial e-mail --spam — and often curse the senders, right? Sometimes the senders of spam get their comeuppance through retaliation from their victims.

One notorious case of immediate, disastrous retaliation against a USENET spammer was described in a December 1994 article http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/sec/2001/00408507.html in Network World in which M.E. Kabay summarized in a column in 1991. The twit who inadvertently posted the same message on multiple USENET groups advertising his company's products got a flood of abusive e-mail, but much worse was that someone posted the company's 800 number on an alt.sex group as if it were a free phone-sex line.

However, Kabay now warns readers that retaliating against the people named in spam is not necessarily a good idea. Sometimes these folks are actually the victims of spammers even more than we recipients are. The senders of these (sometimes intercontinental) misguided missives are actually the victims of criminals who have lied to them. The victims are naïve, unsophisticated business people --sometimes hardworking owners of small U.S. businesses, sometimes bewildered managers of Chinese factories — who have accepted wonderful offers of cheap marketing via e-mail to enormous numbers of willing participants eager to hear from them and carefully filtered to maximize their rate of return on their investment.

An anonymous reader writes: “Grid cells,” which help the brain map locations, have been found for the first time outside of the hippocampus in the rat brain, according to new research from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). The finding should help further our understanding of how the brain generates the internal maps that help us remember where we have been and how to get to where we want to go.

An anonymous reader writes: It seems that the lawyers and the marketing people at The Discovery Channel don't talk to each other much. The marketing people behind the show "The Deadliest Catch" have been supporting a fan community called DeadliestCatchTV.com for a while now. They've regularly sent the site info, free clips, previews and information about the show. On top of that, they link to it from the official site, including it in a list of "fan sites" as a part of the "Discovery Network," and even will frame the site with the show's own dashboard for those who click through. Discovery's lawyers, on the other hand have threatened to sue the site out of existence and have demanded that the owner hand over the domain name — which he is going to do, because he doesn't have the money to fight this. While there may be a trademark issue (which could be easily resolved with a free license), the lawyers are also making the ridiculous argument that posting the videos Discovery sent him to post are copyright infringement. They're also claiming that embedding the official Discovery Channel YouTube videos (which have embedding turned on) is copyright infringement. This is exactly how you turns lots of fans into people who hate your entire channel.

An anonymous reader writes: VUPEN Security has issued a security advisory that reveals the discovery of a new zero-day Windows vulnerability, which could be used by local attackers to mount a denial of service attack or to potentially gain elevated privileges and install malware on the system.

thecarchik writes: One of the criticisms of hybrid cars has historically been that there's no payback, especially given the cheap gasoline prices in the U.S.The extra money you spend on a hybrid isn't returned in gas savings, say critics. Well, that may be true, especially when regular gasoline is averaging $2.77 a gallon this week. But as we often point out, most people don't buy hybrids for payback--they buy them to make a statement about wanting to drive green . Nevertheless, a Canadian study has now looked at the question of hybrid payback in a country whose gasoline is more expensive than ours (roughly $3.70 per gallon this week), with surprising results.

The British Columbia Automobile Association projected the fuel costs of 16 hybrids over five years against their purchase price and financing fees. In a study released in late July, only a single one of the 16 hybrids cost less to buy and run than its gasoline counterpart.

Flash Modin writes: Physicists from the Pierre Auger Observatory have found that the source of elusive ultra-high-energy cosmic rays is cosmic particle accelerators from stars exploding in the Milky Way. These types of explosions have been seen in other galaxies before, but not our own. This story explains how the discovery was made because the observatory detected far more nuclei than it expected. Nuclei from stellar explosions usually disintegrate very fast, but these nuclei were trapped in a galactic magnetic field where they traveled for millions of years before striking the earth's upper atmosphere.

coondoggie writes: The Federal Trade Commission said today that it had permanently killed the operations of a group that it said posed as domain name registrars and convinced thousands of US consumers, small businesses and non-profit organizations to pay bogus bills by leading them to believe they would lose their Web site addresses if they didn't.

nk497 writes: An MP in the UK has had his official email address removed from the parliamentary website, because he's tired of getting "nuisance" emails via online campaign websites. Conservative MP Dominic Raab had his @parliamentary.uk email address removed from his official House of Commons listing after a spat with online lobby group 38 Degrees. "Just processing the emails from your website absorbs a disproportionate amount of time and effort, which we may wish to spend on higher priorities, such as helping constituents in real need or other local or Parliamentary business," he said, threatening to report the group to the government's data and privacy watchdog if they didn't remove the details from their own website. 38 Degrees says Raab gave them his personal email address during the election: "it's only since he became a member of parliament with a taxpayer funded email address that he's now said he doesn't want to hear from people," unless they're willing to shell out for a stamp to write him a letter. The lobby group said Raab likely averaged fewer than two emails from their site each day.

netbuzz writes: Not even the lowly subway flasher can escape the scrutiny of citizen law enforcers wielding the increasingly powerful combination of cell phone cameras connected to social networking sites. A 29-year-old legal clerk riding Boston’s Red Line couldn’t help but notice a flasher doing his thing at rush hour and responded by snapping his photograph and posting it to Twitter with a plea for someone to call the cops. Someone did and the man was arrested, prompting transit authorities to promise to formalize a Twitter-based crime-tip system. Of course, cases like this do raise a question of law enforcement'(TM)s double standard when it comes to photography: Taking pictures of alleged perps is encouraged, while photographing or videotaping a police officer can get you a "wiretapping" charge.

siliconbits writes: According to famed theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, it's time to free ourselves from Mother Earth. "I believe that the long-term future of the human race must be in space," Hawking tells Big Think. "It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn't have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let's hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load."

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Gyrogeerloose was born back in the middle of the last century, when television was black & white (with 13 channels), telephone calls were made by twirling a perforated disk with one's forefinger and computers used vacuum tubes and filled entire buildings.

None the less, he was a fairly early adapter who bought his first personal computer in the early Eighties, a period when 48KB of RAM was considered a lot, and learned to program it in BASIC. He hasn't written any code beyond HTML since selling that computer to finance the parts to build an IBM-PC clone which he never actually completed, having contracted Mac Fever. He also had a Unix shell dial-up Internet access account in the days before the World Wide Web was invented.